Haruki Murakami

"I think sex is an act of . . . a kind of soul-commitment. If the sex is good, your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated. It’s a kind of passage to the upper area, to the better place. In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums—harbingers of the coming world. That’s why they always come to my protagonist; he doesn’t go to them."